yay my first language too
yay my first language too
I think it's probably safe to assume that a good chunk of the programmers initiating between the 70s and late 80s have started with BASIC. It was a very popular programming language then, was free and outperformed ALGOL, Fortran and COBOL.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
I first used BASIC on a TRS 80 (Trash-80). After that it was cartridge-based GW-BASIC on my IBM PCjr and then onto Visual Basic for DOS, QuickBasic 4 and 4.5, and finally stopped with compiled QuickBasic 4.52.
After the VIC-20 I used the TRS-80 (CoCo 2). Nice comp for its time. Wish I still had the schematics for it. I even had the voice synth. for it.
After BASIC though I went to assembly (prior to the TRS-80) It was the only way to get any kind of real performance out of those boxes.
do we have something like an applet that can run my basic program online i want to play with it.
I learned BASIC in 6th grade ('87-'88) on an Apple. Oh, memories of spaghetti and goto and A$ and B$ *twitch*. I wrote a quiz program that my teacher used as a test. It was a whole mess offor like 20 questions with a print "You got" + c + "answers right out of 20." at the end.Code:100 print "Question 1: What is blah?" 110 input A$ 120 if A$="Correct Answer" then goto 150 130 print "No, the correct answer is blah" 140 goto 200 150 print "Correct!" 160 c = c + 1 200 print "Question 2: What is blah?" 210 input A$ ...
My dad got a Timex Sinclair at a garage sale shortly after that and I mucked around with Basic a whole bunch more. I never did get the hang of the Peeks and Pokes (though I am sure I would understand them much better now if I looked back into it) but I helped teach basic in 7th and 8th grade.
Then came my Tandy RL 1000 and more mucking around with Basic until in 9th grade I started learning Pascal. Basic never seemed to be as useful after that. And then C in 12th grade when I tried to disect a WWIV BBS and modify it for our school BBS.
abachler: "A great programmer never stops optimizing a piece of code until it consists of nothing but preprocessor directives and comments "
I taught myself to program using basic on the "green-screen" Apple ][. I started writing text-based console games. They used to have these fantasy role-playing books that you would actually read (not rulebooks). One page would say something like, "Do you attack the wizard (turn to page 35) or flee into the cave entrance (turn to page 56)?" I would write games like that in BASIC.
BASIC was good, it got me into programming. Then I hit C++ and got even more into it.
Yep! On the ZX Spectrum +3 first, then once I got my first PC (at 11 in 1991 - an Amstrad PC1512 with optional 20mb HDD) I moved onto GWBASIC. That lasted for a few years until I got persuaded to learn C by my dad at about 14. I hated it at first and gradually lost interest.
Later I moved onto Qbasic (still using line numbers) before finally being brough round to C at around 17 when I was beginning to see the limits of Basic.
One of my first C projects was a 'humorous' random sentence generator (a project I'd been cultivating since the GWBASIC days).
Last edited by samGwilliam; 05-23-2008 at 03:39 PM. Reason: error C2143: syntax error : missing ')' before '.'
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Yeah, the four coloured disks of destiny!!
Green: GEM.
Red: MS DOS.
Yellow: Some other DOS (PC-DOS or something).
Blue: Er...
I tried to learn that Locomotive Basic2 that came with GEM, but to no avail. And I used to think GEM Paint was the best paint program ever!
I had Elite, some F1 game by Accolade, Digger and some lame Pac Man ripoff called Pokeman.
And do you remember having to park the hard disk before switching off?
Your memory works better than mine. When you mentioned the disks, mine immediately clicked. I didn't try Gem much. I got too hooked on Pascal and especially DBase and thought GUIs would never kick off, hehe. The other DOS was DRDOS that only with the later versions would gain some interest from us.
My games were... hmm... can't remember actually. But all those you mentioned, I played. I also remember Prince of Persia later on and of course, heaps of text adventure games which I was quiet found at the time... plus Pools of Darkness and Curse of the Azure Bonds. The two games that spurred my interest in Pascal after I've read on PCPlus (then quiet sold out to the Amstrad) had been developed in pascal.
I don't seem to recall anything particular about the hard disk.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Weird, I tried searching for Pokeman and couldn't find it anywhere on the net. I typed in the author's name and loads of hits for Pac Gal turned up.
I download it and it's identical in almost every detail apart from the fact that my version was definitely called Pokeman and it had a slightly different tune at the start.
Yet I can't find a single web reference to Pokeman. As if I was literally the only person who had this copy.
Odd.
Was it Pokemon?
If this is a pacman clone, there is no way of telling. There were so many, some unauthorized, that would spread through BBS', and some would even end in magazines companion floppies at the time. Pokeman is a far shot, but pucman was used at least once, I seem to recall.
Took a look at the author (Jimenez, right?) and the software. I played this too. However can't remember the name. But it's quiet possible that you played a different named version. It was quiet usual for some game being freely distributed to end up being altered by someone else. And sometimes the authors would do it themselves, this way ensuring a wider distribution through BBS. Changing the name of a game and some of its features, especially a clone, and most particularly a unauthorized clone was a normal day in a hackers life.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Commodore 64 BASIC was my first programming language. Unfortunately it did not support native graphics or sound -- you had to call out to machine language routines to do that stuff. I remember spending hours entering machine code from the magazine "COMPUTE!'s Gazette" using a proofreading program called MLX. Pages and pages and pages of hex values...
But without that first computer, I don't think I'd be doing this today.